p. 108 | Eloquent Testimony by Uriah Smith

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 22, 1874

Eloquent Testimony.

By Uriah Smith

Croley, in his work on the Apocalypse (London, 1828), pp. 232–235, bears testimony which very clearly elucidates a statement made by the prophet Daniel in chapter 8:12. Daniel says, “And an host was given him against the daily sacrifice by reason of transgression.” There is no doubt that in this and the verses that immediately precede it, Daniel is speaking of the pagan and papal forms of the Roman Empire. The religion of Rome, for more than the first thousand years of its existence, was paganism. Then a strange transition occurred. A mixture of Christianity with paganism, produced the papacy. The prophet, therefore, has the task of presenting virtually two kingdoms in one; and while he has to denote the unity by the use of a single symbol, he has also to indicate the change which made the two divisions of its history as distinct as separate kingdoms. We therefore read the language with this understanding: “And an host [a multitude of people] was given him [the papal abomination] against the daily [the pagan abomination, sacrifice being the wrong word to supply, and the daily referring to paganism] by reason of transgression [that is, by the hideous caricatures of Christianity by which the papacy sought to gain over to itself the superstitious and ignorant tribes of barbarians that overran the Roman Empire].” All of which stands out in bold relief in the following statements by Mr. Croley:—

A. D. 390. Christianity was finally established by Theodosius. The western empire stained with Christian blood was thenceforth broken up, and filled with the northern tribes. Before the close of the sixth century ten barbarian kingdoms were formed in Europe.

Their names and number are stated by Machiavel, certainly an unconscious interpreter of Scripture; the dates are furnished by Bishop Lloyd. 1. The Huns in Hungary, A. D. 356. 2. Ostrogoths in Moesia, 377. 3. Visigoths in Pannonia, 378. 4. Franks in France, 407. 5. Vandals in Africa, 407. 6. Sueves and Alans in Gascoigne and Spain, 407. 7. Burgundians in Burgundy, 407. 8. Heruli and Turingi in Italy, 476. 9. Saxons and Angles in Britain, 476. 10. Lombards began to reign in Hungary, 526, were seated in the north of Germany in 483, and finally settled in the north of Italy. This division had been twice prophesied by Daniel, Dan. 2 and 7, “the ten horns are ten kings.” Dan. 7:24. Those kingdoms all adopted the faith which in the sixth century emanated from Rome. The papacy established its influence over the ten sovereignties of the western empire; and paganism, revived from the dead, began its new career under its new form.

The spirit of the ancient Roman paganism consisted in ceremonial pomp, founded on fables, and constructed with a view to attract the people; in the worship of dead men, whom it deified; in the worship of images, which it honored with prayer, hymns, and incense; and in persecution of the Christian church. Popery was its heir in all those things in the face of the Christian world. It differed from the elder paganism in worshiping, by the name of the Virgin, the statue which its predecessor worshiped by the name of a goddess, and kissing the feet of St. Peter, for those of Jove.

But Roman paganism with all its arts was simplicity itself to the new master of its throne. It was a thing of external glitter, and there its powers and its ambition closed; it solicited no hold upon the mind; it had none of those keener and fiercer instruments of grasp and possession, the fangs and claws, that were yet to strike into the very marrow of mankind. It was a luxurious and giddy, a splendid, and sometimes a profligate exhibition, laughed at by the higher minds, amusing to the multitude, popular and pleasant to all; the graver game of the idle and self-indulgent nations of the south; a more serious shape of human pleasure, gratifying the worshiper by some empty sense of duty done without restraint upon his passions, and keeping his vanity awake without disturbing the slumber of his conscience. It went down to the grave for a time with its idle generation. But, when it returned to the world, a great revolution had passed over the surface. It found the old system of society broken into ruin irreparable, a host of new nations with new and rival interests, a bolder temperament, and a manlier intellectual capability, struggling for mastery, sword in hand, on the soil which had once lain smooth and uniform as the slavery that moved over it. It found a still sterner trial in the presence of the true religion, that stood even in that day of adversity, like its Lord in the wilderness, the sign to the evil spirit that his time was at hand; and putting his proudest temptation to shame.

To fight its battle through this iron multitude up to empire, other means were essential than the feeble contrivances of the past. A kingdom and a priesthood, it must seek conquests and converts, and it must obtain the one without an army and the other without the gospel. Auricular confession, absolution, indulgences, miracles of bones, images, and pictures, and, to crown the whole stupendous imposture, transubstantiation, the claim of man to be the maker of God! were the guilty and powerful means by which paganism, new risen, forced its way through the tumult of nations,—the spells by which weakness was made stronger than strength; which turned the Lombard and the Norman, that had cloven down the Roman Empire, into the nerveless slaves of Rome; and bowed in worship the bold barbarian crowns and helmets of the north and west before the feet of a monk and an Italian.

U. S.